Earlier today, I just happened to be browsing the Student Residences (or “resis”) for open Windows shares — boy, is there a lot of stuff available there!

Knowing where to look is obviously part of the battle, but once you start finding stuff, it’s everywhere. In a short amount of time, I found whole TV series (US and Japanese), movies, albums, what looks to be student’s work (not so sure if that’s a good idea to leave shared), games, programs, and probably anything else that regularly gets pirated.

There seems to be an open sharing community amongnst the students, since many of the open shares had a “leave stuff here” directory for people to dump their crap into. Since I never went to university as a student, and most definintely never lived on-site, I never expected to see stuff being shared in this manner on-site. I would’ve thought password-protection would have been the way to go, obviously not.

The most commonly available thing was music, and lots of it. If you want to easily see what’s being (badly) shared at your workplace, grab yourself a copy of NetBrute.

My favourite saying since Monday has been “urgh”. On Monday morning, I woke up feeling pretty sore (for no apparent reason, since I’d had a pretty relaxing weekend). Thinking I’d just slept in a funny position I went to work in a pretty normal manner.

By the time I got there, I wasn’t thinking particularly straight, and when I was asking Shane (the new IT guy, who is working on contract while Glenn is away) to restore a file from backup, I seem to recall not thinking very straight. By lunch time, I knew the day was a loss (I hadn’t actually managed to do any work yet) and went home.

I pretty much sat in front of the TV for a few hours, and went to bed early on Monday. Tuesday was, unfortunately, even worse. I called in sick (the third sick day in over two years, I must be slipping) and spent the day in bed and ont he couch. Again I went to bed early.

Which leads us to today; I’m still at home, not feeling too great (though not as bad as yesterday) — this is the first time I’ve had two sick days off in a row for probably 4 years. I’m too stubborn to go to the doctor, but I suppose I really should make an effort so I can pump myself full of drugs.

Oh yeah, “urgh”.

Posting your personal and private feelings and experiences is sometimes difficult enough without having to worry about losing your job or being sued. Well, it’s happened in the past, and it’s still happening.

Last year, a Microsoft employee posted (on his personal blog) a photo of a stack of G5s arriving at a Microsoft office. A few days later, the guy was fired; the termination was a direct result of the earlier post.

Earlier this year, an employee of Friendster just happened to make two posts regarding what work she’d done at Friendster. A couple of weeks later, she too was fired.

More recently, Sun’s CEO’s personal blogging regarding HP’s business strategies has landed him into some trouble with HP sending a nasty letter. Of course, Sun isn’t going to back down (I wonder what they’d have done if it wasn’t their CEO?) and responded telling HP to get stuffed.

A bit worrying really; I can see the reasons for the actions taken against the (now) ex-employees but to be honest they’re a bit over-the-top and I’d hate to ever be in such a position just for writing my opinion.

Last night, we watched Moulin Rouge. Normally, I wouldn’t watch this sort of film since I’m not really a big fan of musicals. However, a few days earlier I happened across a few short snippets and thought, stylistically, the film looked interesting.

Coming out the other end, I’m glad I watched it but am not in any major hurry to revisit. Mainly, the sappy love songs are not what interests me and it took a bit of an effort to sit through some of them. I could tell they were “clever” with their use of other songs but didn’t really grab me in any way.

What I did like though, were some of the early scenes, like Christian’s “discovery” of absinthe (the green fairy was an interesting appearance, not because of the “actor”, but because of one absinthe’s many names was the green fairy) and the scene where the play’s story is first written (and told to the Duke). Had the film kept up with the lighthearted music video style I probably would have probably enjoyed it more.

Not bad, but not really my cup of tea.

Yesterday I attended a website accessibility forum run by the National Information Library Service (NILS). The main focus of the forum was website accessibility (funny that, given the name) but much of the methodology can be applied to any software/computer-y design.

I didn’t learn too much technical stuff, but it was quite interesting to see (well, hear) how a text-to-speech web browser handles a website (and they’re a lot more advanced than you’d think!) or how a visually impaired (not blind) person deals with a website using tools such as screen magnifiers.

For instance, I never imagined that putting a * on the right-hand side of a field to indicate it was manditory could be bad. However, when using a screen magnifier, you never even see the * tell you it’s manditory. Same goes with a “back to top” link, which is generally on the right-hand side of the page if at the bottom of a page (though they’re normally inline if in a FAQ type page) — they never get seen.

The really interesting (well, sort of) thing I learned is that it’s OK to use JavaScript. Some JavaScript stuff is bad (like an onChange event on dropdowns (tab into a dropdown and try to select something on this site, go on!) though much of it is actually fine. I’d always tried to shy away from using JavaScript for accessibility reasons but to be honest it’s not these users that have it disabled.

So yeah, some interesting things were learned and some new approaches will be made on our work’s website. I know this because the web manager was there with me furiously taking notes on some things. NILS puts out this great toolbar which unfortunately requires IE5+ (kind of backwards since they want accessibility) which is similar to the web developer toolbar I spoke about ages ago. I have spent an hour or so today trying to figure out how to modify the web developer toolbar to use some of the NILS accessibility features. I shall call it “mega-toolbar”.

Oh, and Bobby and Hermish are accessibility testing tools, before I forget to mention them.

Work recently got a new fleet car, a Holden Commodore VZ model. This model is basically an update of the VY model, which is barely any different to the VT/VX series (if you ask me).

To be honest, when driving to Geelong on one of my weekly jaunts, I didn’t notice any major differences between this and the last one we had (which was a VY); heck, I barely noticed any minor differences either.

What I did notice was the digital speedo you can have in place of the digital odometer. Of course, when I was doing 100km/h on the way back from Geelong, I couldn’t resist testing it against one of those “how fast are you going” things mounted on bridges. At 100km/h, the thing reported I was doing 95km/h. So much for a digital speedo to help you not get fines (well, if it’s showing 5% more than you’re actually doing, I suppose it’s useful).

The other interesting thing I noticed (and this is why I’m posting, since I’ve never driven a car with this feature before) was the new option on the headlight dial thing (it had Off, Parkers, On and Auto). Of course, I didn’t actually notice the auto option at first. It just so happened I had to drive through the tunnel to get to Geelong, and as I went in, the dash lights were suddenly on. Huh? I looked ahead and sure enough, their car was lit up by my headlights. Leaving the tunnel, the lights turned themselves off after about 20 seconds.

Now that is a useful feature in a car!

Welcome to the 21st century Michael, finally.

Yesterday, I purchased an NEC-ND3500A DVD burner, after “umming” and “ahhing” for many a month. I decided to buy this because it’s apparently got the same circuit board as the Pioneer DVR-A08/108 models — they’re both made by NEC and that it can fool DVD players into thinking a DVD+R is really a pressed DVD by changing the book type.

I’ve already flashed the drive with a newer firmware that is RPC-I (not RPC-II). RPC-II is region-locked (after 5 changes) whereas RPC-I is basically region free (i.e. good). The only DVD-R discs I have are 4x at the moment so I will have to wait to see how fast 16x is and what dual-layer discs turn out like.